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The Immortal Memory 

Speech Delivered by 

Mr. Tohn Foord 

j «\ 

at the Annual Dinner of the 

Burns Society of the City of New York 

at Delmonico's 



January 25, 191 6 



minium 



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"The Immortal Memory' 

Speech Delivered by Mr. John Foord at the Annual Dinner 

of the Burns Society of the City of New York at 

Delmonico's, January 25, 1916. 



"Burns, thou should'st be living at this hour; the world 
hath need of thee !" So might we paraphrase Wordsworth's 
invocation to Milton, forgetting that Burns is living at this 
hour; that his spirit is a vital force in the minds and 
hearts of many more thousands of his fellow-men than he 
ever addressed in his lifetime. In the trenches on the far- 
flung battle-line, and on the grim guardians of Britain's sea 
power, the very tones of his voice have sounded to-day in 
the ears of tens of thousands of the men in whose hands 
rests the future of human freedom. So, in all the years 
in which we have celebrated the birthday of Robert Burns, 
there has been none in which the undying and indestructi- 
ble influence of the man we honor has been so manifest 
as it is at this present hour. Throughout all the years in 
which a response has been made to "The Immortal Mem- 
ory" there has been none in which the message he de- 
livered to Scotland and the world bore so intimate a 
relation to the cause of liberty which he so passionately 
loved, and to the service of that human brotherhood which 
was the thinker's inspiration and the poet's dream. For 
this man was not only the greatest of Scotsmen; he was 
Scotland's epitome, and the spirit that animates the Briton 
of to-day is one that was born and nurtured among the 
hills and straths of Caledonia. The most imperative of 
its moods is a sentiment finer than any that springs merely 
from the sense of duty, broader than is derived from the 
love of home, — a sentiment that is informed by the 
enthusiasm of humanity and quickened by the divine ardor 
at whose prompting man stands ready to die for man, 

"to venture life and love and youth, 
For the great prize of death in battle." 

In this cataclysm of which we are awe-struck spectators, 
in which all that is fiendish, no less than all that is godlike, 



in our common humanity stands revealed, men and nations 
have stripped themselves of the disguises they had grown 
accustomed to wear. The savage, heretofore masquerading 
under the cloak of "kultur," stands forth plain savage, with 
all his primal instincts unmodified and unrefined, naked 
and unashamed. On the other hand, in the practical, 
prudent and peace-loving descendant of generations of 
born fighters, there has been awakened the tingling joy of 
combat that his fathers knew, and because of the priceless 
boon of independence that is his native heritage, there has 
come to him the stern resolve, if die he must, to die the 
death of a freeman, struggling that those who come after 
him may be free. 

This is the Scottish spirit that found its noblest expres- 
sion and its most characteristic interpretation in the poetry 
of Burns. Centuries went to the making of the impulses 
which culminated in the genius of Scotland's own inspired 
bard, and while Scottish blood courses in the veins of 
men there never will be a time when the echoes of his 
voice will fail to produce a sympathetic throb in the Scot- 
tish heart or to lend a new and fervid quickening to the 
motions of the Scottish mind. His nature held no deeper 
or stronger feeling than that of devotion to the memory 
of the heroes who had led his country's long struggle for 
independence. As a boy he explored every den and dell of 
the Leglen wood which had sheltered Sir William Wallace, 
with as much enthusiasm he said as ever pilgrim felt 
toward Loretto. Even then his heart glowed with a wish 
to be able to make a song on Wallace — a wish unfulfilled 
save for this noble stanza: 

"At Wallace' name what Scottish blood 
But boils up in a spring-time flood! 
Oft have our fearless fathers strode 

By Wallace' side, 
Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, 

Or glorious died." 

But who shall say that, in its largest sense, the wish was 
not fulfilled when he gave to the world "Scots wha hae' 
wi' Wallace bled" — the greatest war-ode ever penned by 
man? 
While the martial note is by no means the dominant one 



in the poetry or the songs of Robert Burns, they are 
interpenetrated with the love of freedom. And that is true 
of all our Scottish singers. In the very dawn of our 
national poetry, in the fourteenth century, John Barbour, 
the Archdeacon of Aberdeen, wrote one of the noblest 
panegyrics on freedom to be found in any literature — free- 
dom without which "a noble heart may have nane ease," 
"freedom mair to prize than all the gold in warld that is." 
The same note was struck by Dunbar, Blind Harry, Robert 
Henryson and Gavin Douglas in the morning of Scottish 
song, as loudly and clearly as it was by Burns in its high 
noon. In this fervent love of freedom, the Scottish poets 
of all the centuries join hands, simply because they were 
Scotsmen, and to have had any sentiment out of accord 
with that one would have marked them as unworthy of 
their motherland. Sir Walter expresses the passion in its 
purest and most exalted terms ; lesser men like Henry 
Scott Riddell in its most aggressive, as thus: 

"They tell o' lands wi' brighter skies, 

Where freedom's voice ne'er rang; 
Gie me the hills where Ossian lies, 

And Coila's minstrel sang; 
For I've nae skill o' lands, my lads, 

That kenna to be free; 
Then Scotland's right and Scotland's might 

And Scotland's hills for me." 

In like vein is Robert Nicoll's : 

"Where the caller breezes sweep 
Across the mountain's breast, 
Where the free in soul are nurst 
Is the land that we lo'e best." 

But why multiply examples? The truth I am proclaim- 
ing is a commonplace to every Scotsman here, because we 
imbibed the passion for liberty with our mother's milk. 
Burns had it before he read as a boy the paraphrase of 
Blind Harry's Story of Wallace, which he says "poured a 
tide of Scottish prejudice into his veins which will boil 
there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest." He 
had it, too, like most men of his race in all the ages, 
closely associated with a deep and abiding love for the 



land of his birth. It was from his heart that the invoca- 
tion came: 

"O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent! 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 
Be bless'd with health, and peace, and sweet content !" 

And from the heart, too, most emphatically came the 
avowal : 

"Even then a wish, I mind its power, 
A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast, 
That I, for puir auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least !" 

"Or sing a sang at least!" It seemed to him as if he 
could do so little for his country, and yet he would gladly 
have done all. Quite unconsciously, however, he was doing 
to his native land, to the United Kingdom, to the British 
Empire that was then, and that was to be, a service not less 
enduring than that of the men who were piloting the bark 
of state through the most stormy and perilous time of 
all its history. The achievement of the statesmen must be 
reckoned incomparably a greater one than the writing of 
a song, but the fame of the song-writer may stand the 
ordeal of time better than that of the statesman, if the 
song have in it a spirit that never dies. Strange as it 
would have sounded in their own time, the tenant farmer 
of Mossgiel, the gauger at Dumfries, supplies in the hour 
of his country's need to-day an inspiration which nor Pitt, 
nor Fox, nor Burke, nor Sheridan can provide. There 
might seem to be a touch of the miraculous in that, were 
it not a familiar fact in human experience that the forces 
which move the world are those that strongly and deeply 
move men's souls. 

It was from his heart and soul that Burns wrote; no 
poet ever spoke in tones of such perfect sincerity; no 
poet ever subordinated himself so absolutely to the desire 
he had to serve, as best he could, his native land. Burns 
did not stop to inquire how much or how little his native 
land had done for him, still less to try to drive a bargain 
with her on the principle of give and take. It was enough 



for him that this was the land of his fathers, and that he 
was the heir of her glorious memories ; nay, even a humble 
successor of those nameless old song-writers who could 
feel so strongly and describe so well; enough for him that 
he had been born amid 

"Auld Coila's plains and fells, 
Her moors red-brown wi' heather bells, 
Her banks and braes, her dens and dells, 

Where glorious Wallace 
Aft bure the gree, as story tells 

Frae southron billies." 

Here was a land that a man might proudly die for, if 
need were, but to which the best immediate service that a 
rustic bard could render was to conserve her native music, 
and add to the store of her treasure-house of song. And 
so, for the mere love of the thing, and without fee or 
reward, ungrudgingly he worked day and night for the last 
nine years of his life to furnish appropriate words for the 
old airs of Scotland, and he died with the pen in his hand. 

He was keenly aware that there was much in the political 
institutions of Great Britain, particularly in what he called 
"a system of corruption between the executive power and 
the representative part of the legislature," that urgently 
needed amendment. He said this in reply to a reproof for 
overmuch freedom of speech that had been administered to 
him by his employers, the Board of Excise, and he took the 
risk it involved for this among other reasons : "I have 
three sons, who I see already have brought into the world 
souls ill qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves." But that 
did not tend to weaken the fierce outburst of patriotic 
fervor of his lines to the Dumfries volunteers, where his 
differentiation only makes his defiance of Britain's foes 
more energetic: 

"The kettle o' the kirk and state 

Perhaps a claut may fail in't; 
But deil a foreign tinkler loon 

Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
Our fathers' bluid the kettle bought 

And wha wad dare to spoil it 
By Heaven ! the sacrilegious dog 

Shall fuel be to boil it." 



That may not be great poetry, but it is the embodiment 
of sober patriotic sense, and has the sound of a trumpet 
call to battle. But the strain is of a higher mood that has 
rung in the ears of the tens of thousands of Scotsmen 
who have flocked to the colors so that their percentage of 
enlistment became the highest in the British Empire: 

"By oppression's woes and pains, 
By your sons in servile chains, 
We will drain our dearest veins 

But they shall be free. 
Lay the proud usurpers low! 
Tyrants fall in every foe! 
Liberty's in every blow! 

Let us do, or die !" 

To the humblest of the Scottish recruits these lines were 
familiar as household words : to the least devout of them 
it was second nature to say with the man who was in- 
spired to write them: "So may God defend the cause of 
truth and liberty as he did that day." 

And here we strike the larger theme — "The cause of 
truth and liberty," which embraces indeed your country's 
independence and your own freedom, but to which con- 
ceivably your heart and soul may be dead when it tran- 
scends the area of your local patriotism. It is strongly 
characteristic of Burns that his enthusiasm for liberty 
owned no such narrow limitations. The man who could 
proclaim himself the "poor, earth-born companion an' 
fellow-mortal" of the field-mouse, whose heart could feel 
a pang for "the ourie cattle, or silly sheep wha bide this 
brattle o' winter war," was not the man whose ardent 
sympathy could fail to be aroused for men struggling to be 
free, from whatever land or race they might have sprung. 
It may be that in this matter Scotsmen have been gifted 
with a larger view because of the influence of Burns. It is 
certain that their perfervid patriotism, so far from ex- 
pending itself on its immediate object, has prompted them 
to spring to the defense of the larger issue — the all- 
embracing cause. Their blood has already reddened the 
soil of the old battlefield in Flanders where their fathers 
fought, and the end is not yet in sight. But there can be 
only one end to a struggle in which such a cause brings to 



its defense men animated by such a spirit. One would be 
tempted to doubt the continued existence of the balance of 
the universal scheme of creation, if a flagrant defiance of 
the first principles of right and justice should be crowned 
with success; if barbarity should oust humanity; if truth, 
compassion and brotherhood can safely be rejected as 
attributes of men. Burns lived in a time when Satanic 
influences had also their hour of triumph, and he encoun- 
tered in his life glaring instances enough of man's in- 
humanity to man. But his faith did not waver either in 
the future of his country's freedom or in the ultimate 
supremacy of the noblest aspirations of the race: 

"Then let us pray that come it may, 

As come it will for a' that; 
That sense and worth o'er a' the earth 

May bear the gree, and a' that. 

For a' that, and a' that, 

It's coming yet, for a' that, 
That man to man the warld o'er 

Shall brothers be for a' that." 

That conviction has come to be part of the every-day 
thought of the plain, ordinary Scotsman; it belongs to the 
very fibre and distinctive cast of his mind. But that, too, 
like the intensity of the love of country which he shares 
with Burns and with generations of ancestry of whom 
Burns was the natural heir, needed the endowment of a 
vivid imagination to make it a spring of action. I think 
you will agree with me that it is largely because of the 
quickness with which they respond to the imaginative im- 
pulse that so many Scotsmen are in the forefront of the 
struggle which convulses the world to-day — that they have 
been the readiest among Britons to discern the real issues 
of that gigantic conflict, and the most willing to lay down 
their lives that freedom may not perish from the earth and 
mere brute force reign supreme among men. It was to this 
imagination that Burns made his appeal, and he did it so 
successfully that Emerson could truthfully say : "The con- 
fession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the 
French Rights of Man and the Marseillaise, are not more 
weighty documents in the history of freedom than the 
songs of Burns." 

It will be the part of history to place a true valuation 



on what the British Empire owes to the spirit that pos- 
sessed Burns — a spirit that will live in the breasts of men 
of Scottish blood while his memory endures. I have 
steadily contended that the sentiment which holds the 
Empire together has nothing to do with questions of tariff 
or trade. When Canada, Australia and New Zealand send 
many more men to fight for the Empire than it was 
thought possible before this war for the United Kingdom 
itself to equip for service abroad, it is in obedience to 
something higher than a merely commercial prompting. 
For an Empire that comprises one-fifth of the human 
family and occupies about the same proportion of the 
habitable surface of the globe, which, if it is to be united 
at all, must be bound together by a sentiment which the 
Malay of the Federated States shares with the Canadian, 
the Jamaica negro with the New Zealander, the Hottentot 
in his kraal with the denizen of Mayfair, the enthusiasm 
of the bagman will not take the place of a soul. If citizen- 
ship of Rome were valued as a proud distinction even by 
the Apostle of the Gentiles, think you that citizenship of a 
greater, juster and more beneficent Empire shall not be 
cherished for its own sake by all her sons? Colonial 
patriotism need not die to make way for this feeling, any 
more than Scottish patriotism has died. Love for the land 
of our birth, be it ever so intense, pride in the deeds of her 
sons, be it ever so conscious, merely tend to exalt the love 
and pride that are stirred by the greater entity of which 
the land is merely a part. Nay, more— unless you have 
the one I cannot think it possible you will be richly en- 
dowed with the other. If the blood does not leap in a' 
your veins as you read Scott's noble apostrophe beginning, 
"Lives there the man with soul so dead?" I cannot believe 
that your breast will greatly swell as you think how free- 
dom's banner streams like a thunder cloud against the 
wind in Armageddon. Nor can I imagine that the reflec- 
tion will ever occur to you that the vital principles of 
human freedom are as clearly at stake in the battlefields 
of Europe to-day as they were at Marathon and Salamis, 
and that the defeat of the Allies would mean the eclipse 
of all civilization worthy of the name as surely as the 
defeat of the Greeks would have meant twenty-four hun- 
dred years ago. 

8 



And the people of this our adopted land, composite of 
all races but always closer akin to our own, whose pulses 
quicken at the strains of "Scots wha hae," and all the 
breadth of whose human sympathy responds to the senti- 
ment of "A man's a man for a' that," think you that they 
can be indifferent spectators of the shifting fortunes of 
the battle-shock between the highest and the lowest of 
human ideals? This Republic has flourished and grown 
great because it has given to men of all nations, kindreds 
and tongues, the priceless boon of opportunity, and its 
crowning glory is that step by step with its growth in 
wealth and power there has gone on, through its agency 
and influence, the betterment and the elevation of human- 
ity. Even the hyphenated citizen who abuses the hospi- 
tality of the United States to conspire against its peace, 
conducts his plotting under the aegis of that inherited 
British freedom which Caledonia nursed and of which 
Burns sang — of that equal justice which the fathers of this 
Republic were taught to revere because it rested on the 
strongest bulwark ever fashioned against tyranny, the 
common law of England. We may palter and falter, and 
temporize as we will, but the struggle is ours also, and with 
its issue is bound up our very existence as a free people. 
It was with a clear vision that Robert Burns hailed in 
George Washington the architect of an edifice of human 
freedom worthy of the admiration of Scotsmen. It will 
be a dull and purblind generation that finds in the counsel 
of Washington reason for standing idly by while the very 
existence of the principles that triumphed with Washing- 
ton is at stake. 

I do not seek to intrude here within the domain of 
statesmanship, and I have no indictment to bring against 
the men who have had to deal with a situation of excep- 
tional delicacy and difficulty. My purpose is to prove that 
the cult of freedom, of which our national poet was a 
veritable high priest, has moulded the character of our 
Scottish race and helped to fan to a white heat the devotion 
to liberty of men and nations to-day. Partakers of the 
exaltation of mind and spirit which this world-struggle has 
generated, our American people are not yet. But it is not 
too much to say that their thoughts are slowly broadening 

9 



as they gaze, and I feel that they, too, will have a higher 
and clearer outlook as they realize that there has passed 
over our people in the old home, as with a breath of the 
Divine spirit, a marvelous transformation of soul. I am 
not making a too partial claim when I say that this trans- 
formation is in the line of spiritual succession from the 
national consciousness of which Burns was the greatest 
exemplar. In the new note that has been sounded in the 
English poetry of to-day, there is an echo of both the feel- 
ing and method of our national bard, and he who gave 
promise of being the greatest English poet of our time had 
much in common with Robert Burns. Untimely cut off at 
twenty-seven, a martyr to the cause of which he, easily 
and naturally, became the laureate, Rupert Brooke is one 
fitted to command the homage of every lover of Burns, 
than whom of all the poets that have gone before none 
would have so sincerely appreciated and so warmly ex- 
tolled these lines : 

"Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! 

There's none of those so lonely and poor or old, 
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold, 
These laid the world away; poured out the red 
Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
That men call age ; and those who would have been, 
Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 

"Blow, bugles, blow ! They brought us, for our dearth, 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. 

Honor has come back, as a king, to earth 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage; 

And Nobleness walks in our ways again; 
And we have come into our heritage." 



10 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 388 013 8 & 




014 388 013 8 



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Mill Run 1 




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pH 8.5 

Mul Run F03-2193 



